Uplifting Athletes: An example of the good coming from Penn State football

May 27, 2014by Chris Adamski

Penn State football, of course, has had its share of negative publicity over the past 2 ½ years. But it shouldn’t be forgotten there’s plenty of good to come out of the program and the school.

There’s THON, a wonderful and highly-successful university-at-large student-run philanthropic endeavor that’s not football program-centric. For a nationwide program that was started at Penn State by Penn State football players and is administrated today by current Penn State players, check out the work being done by Uplifting Athletes.

Penn State football players have raised more than $825,000 for kidney cancer patients over the past 11 years, dating back to the forerunner of Uplifting Athletes (which has chapters at 22 universities – including Ohio State, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Florida State and Notre Dame – listed on its website).

The Lift For Life has endured since, raising increasing amounts of money for raising awareness and research opportunities for those affected by kidney cancer, which is classified as a “rare disease.” Each school’s chapter of Uplifting Athletes aligns a college football team with a different rare disease, which UA defines as a disease that affects fewer than 200,000 Americans and consequently lacks financial incentive to make and market new treatments (combined, almost 30 million Americans are affected by rare diseases). Shirley serves as Uplifting Athletes’ full-time executive director.

The organization has moved past just Penn State, but the Nittany Lions’ chapter is thriving. Linebacker Ben Kline serves as president, with running back Deron Thompson the vice president, tight end Adam Breneman secretary, tight end (and South Allegheny HS alum) Jessse James the director of marketing, running back Akeel Lynch the compliance manager, among other officers.

“It’s something that’s been kind of passed on here for the last 12 years, and it’s been something that a lot of guys put a lot of time into and done a really good job with it,” Kline said. “And the guys who did it while I was here – (former PSU offensive linemen Mike) Farrell and (Eric) Shrive and (Adam) Gress and Ty (Howle) and (linebacker) Glenn (Carson) – those are some of my best friends, so to see the time they put into it, my group of friends that’s kind of doing it now wants to do a good job with it and make sure that they everything that the guys put into it before us kind of got carried on. And that’s kind of how we see our responsibility with it and that’s why we are trying to do as good a job as we can with it.”

Kline deflects any credit for any of Uplifting Athletes’ accomplishments, saying being president “is just a title” and that “everyone on the team is really into it… we do a good job of sharing the responsibilities.” He was asked to serve as president by this past season’s outgoing officers, and Kline got his circle of friends within the team on board.

“They said, ‘Would this be something you’d be interested in and your crew would be interested in?’” Kline said. “And I said, ‘yeah,’ and kind of one thing led to another and then I was a president. And the rest of our crew kind of rounds out the board and the rest of the team does an awesome job of doing everything we can to help out people who are affected by kidney cancer.”

Lynch, for example, said Kline, a redshirt senior, approached him about joining the board. “I said, ‘Sure,’ because Ben’s a good guy and I’ll definitely follow his leadership.”

Penn State linebacker Mike Hull remembers the meeting that Shrive and others called to recruit their successors as the officers/caretakers of Uplifting Athletes before Shrive and others graduated. Hull, the defense’s 2014 captain and a Canon-McMillan alum, said he noticed Kline quickly – and wholeheartedly – bought into the organization’s mission.

“He’s been doing a really good job fundraising and raising money ever since,” Hull said. “He’s into that kind of stuff; he’s really smart and he takes it really seriously. It’s for a great cause.

It didn’t take long for Kline’s community-service efforts to catch the eye of his new head coach.

“Every time we’re doing some type of community service activity, he’s all over it,” James Franklin said earlier this spring. “He’s involved in everything.”

The Lift for Life and Uplifting Athletes, Kline insists, is a full team-wide venture.

“Guys are really, really helpful, coming to events and things like that, doing everything they can to get involved,” he said. “We do a great job of making sure that everybody is involved and everybody really wants to be involved which is awesome. The guys who maybe have the important titles, it makes our jobs a lot easier because everybody wants to be involved and everybody wants to help.”

To pledge to the Lift For Life at Penn State, click here. To donate to the Uplifting Athletes organization, click here.

Chris Adamski joined Trib Total Media's Steelers coverage team in 2014 after spending two seasons on the Penn State football beat for the Trib. Before that, he had worked in Pittsburgh sports media for more than a decade, extensively covering the Steelers, Pirates, Penguins, Pitt, Duquesne and the WPIAL.

" An example of the good coming from Penn State football". That headline alone is so symbolic of what has been wrong with the media and those people who can not separate the acts of ONE CRIMINAL, an EX-Coach and the failures of a FEW PAST SCHOOL LEADERS. It is sad that a group of 18-21 year old STUDENT athletes on a team are the ones bearing the load of a punishment THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THEM. We are now 2 1/2 years separated from what happen, the criminal is behind bars and the past leaders are going through trial, but people especially those who are small minded are still judging the MANY by the acts of a FEW. The football team had nothing to do with Sandusky then or now, so please stop carry on with this notion and start by making articles about the team WITHOUT referencing a CRIMINAL and those PAST SCHOOL LEADERS and then those who NO NOTHING and CAN'T THINK will be able see that there is NO connection other than the one the MEDIA made up.

The only ones to blame for this are Joe Paterno and his legion of EXTREMISTS. This COULD have (and SHOULD have) been handled very differently. If Paterno is infuriated by Sandusky's crimes and makes it his mission to make sure that children are protected from this child abuse predator, the story is very different. Then the story is how even though a criminal gets in the ranks of PSU, the VALUES and ETHICS of the organization are such that they will have ZERO TOLERANCE FOR CRIMINALS. But as we KNOW, that is NOT what happened. And even worse, thousands of misguided extremists have gone on to DEFEND the TERRIBLE MISTAKES AND FAILURES by Paterno, Schultz, Curley, Spanier, et. al. So is it ANY WONDER that now the nation and media will be suspicious of anything PSU does? This is not what is wrong with the MEDIA. This is what is wrong with PSU.